


they who made you

by verity



Category: Black Widow (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-14
Updated: 2015-04-14
Packaged: 2018-03-22 20:01:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3741829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verity/pseuds/verity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For thirty-four weeks, five days, ten hours, and sixteen minutes, your time and your body were your own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	they who made you

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to Ashe and Snick and whomever else I made look at the beginning of this when I started it in January. <3

You are lying in a chair awaiting the technician. They had to sedate you first: you're strapped down now, guard between your teeth like a good boy. The weight of your failure is heavy and shameful, but it will be gone soon enough. Everything always goes at the end.

"—proper authorization," one of them says in English. "I'd like to see—"

"Oh, I'll show you," says another.

The lamp overhead is hot. Your forehead is damp, sweaty. They'll wipe you down before they attach the electrodes. You keep your eyes shut and stay still in the chair. Thirty-four weeks, five days, ten hours, sixteen minutes. You're supposed to report in at least once a week, even on long assignments, but you didn't at all. They used to punish you for things like that—for smaller things—but they don't anymore. They just say, _next time you'll do better_ , and then you go into the void.

"I'm sorry, James." Warm fingers on your wrist, pressure just firm enough that the sensors on your arm pick it up. "No rest for you just yet."

You open your eyes, look at the woman in front of you. She has dark hair. Her eyes are blue.

—

The woman signs for you, like a package. You take the long elevator ride up together, twelve stories. As you approach the top, you begin to shiver: the sweat at your temples and between your shoulder blades is cool. The woman is dressed warmly in jeans and a down coat. She says, "We'll be out of here soon."

The elevator shaft terminates on the ground floor of a disused parking garage, the concrete walls covered in graffiti. Snow is blowing through the openings between concrete panels. There is a blue truck with chains on the tires parked close to the entrance. You follow the woman toward it like a dumb animal. You are a dumb animal: that's how they caught you, when you went to ground.

"What are you doing?" you say to the woman as she unlocks the passenger side for you. "Why are you here?"

She opens the door. "Get in."

—

The cab of the truck is full of blankets, more than you could possibly need. You put one around your feet, one over your lap, a third across your shoulders, buckle yourself in. The woman shoves another at you; you fold it up and make it into a pillow to prop between your head and the window.

You change cars twice, in Missoula and again in Cheyenne. The second car is a sedan, the third a new sports utility vehicle. Outside Cheyenne, the woman touches her face and takes off a net. A mask. "Do you recognize me?"

You do. "Natasha Romanoff." And, in Russian, "The Black Widow."

"Am I still a target?" she says. "Better get it done, if you're going to kill me. You can buy a few months on your own with the papers I have for you in the back."

You're quiet, looking ahead at the road. The Black Widow is a good driver, attentive, calm. She's been driving for a long time. It was dark when you left from—wherever—and the sky is dimming again, orange to red to purple through the bare branches of the trees beside the highway.

—

Your destination is a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. The radiator pipes crank and whistle, the windows are steamed up against the cold, and there are even more blankets in the couch, on the bed in the room downstairs that the Black Widow shows you to. Whatever they gave you, it's still running through your system; again, you fall asleep.

When you wake, it's light out, and the Black Widow is the couch in the living room, legs stretched out along the cushions, engrossed in a book. If you wanted to kill her, it would be easy, rote. It's what you know how to do.

You say, "You've gone to a lot of trouble just to kill me." You tuck your hands into your armpits. One feels cold; the other is actually below body temperature.

A page rustles, turning; the Black Widow doesn't look up. Her hands are small, calloused. Her names are Natasha, Natalie, Nata. Natalya. Something they gave you. Everything you know was given to you, somehow.

Some gift.

—

The bath is an old, enamel tub, slow to warm. You run hot water in it for a minute before you stopper it to fill. The last time you bathed was in the changing rooms of a shuttered, covered public pool. You found the shut-off outside, freed the valve, then let cold water rain down on your exposed skin, sluicing the blood away. You had taken off the grease already, poured half a container of vegetable oil over your human hand and scrubbed at the grime with a brush, beneath your fingernails, the grooves of your palms. This knowledge they gave you, too: oil sticks to oil, cleans easier than soap. You are always fastidious when it comes to cleaning up evidence.

The Black Widow opens the door to toss in something—a trash bag, thick and black, and half-dozen rubber bands. "Cover your arm. We'll deal with it later."

You secure the bag at the wrist, the elbow, and last at the join. The mirror over the sink is already beginning to steam. Your reflection fades in patches, losing a cheekbone, an eye, the curve of your jaw as you recede into fog.

In the bath, you are thorough, scrubbing beneath your arms, behind your ears, and between your legs. There is no showerhead, so you rinse your hair beneath the faucet and dump cupped handfuls of clean water over the rest of you. You do not like immersion, but you followed the man on the bridge into the river, and you brought him back up with you.

The exception that proves the rule: the man on the bridge is something of your own.

You rise from the bath and wring out your hair, towel yourself dry. You release your trapped limb from its shield.

—

The Black Widow inspects your arm. "Did you do the repairs on this?" She looks up at you often, checking for your reaction. Her care is unnecessary. Indistinct from your chassis, you are a tool in need of maintenance. "This is good work."

You don't respond except to turn your left arm in her hand, giving her access to the interior panels that you have been unable to reshape. She hums to herself and runs a finger down the bands of metal that shift like scales as you tense and release the mechanisms beneath them. Earlier versions simulated muscle: the infrastructure was less resilient to damage. Beneath the shell, this arm is no simulacrum. As soon as she removes a panel, she'll see.

"That's enough for now," the Black Widow says instead. "I have something I want to show you."

She spreads a series of files over the table in the kitchen, paper in manila folders. Some labeled in Russian, some in English, some in written Chinese. You can read each one, though your Cantonese is poor. They say, _Winter Soldier_. Each its own set of incomplete data. "Paper?" you say. "Not electronic?"

The Black Widow says, "Not everything's been digitized."

So these are older, then. Most of the papers are yellowed, though the ones in English are crisp and new. Print-outs. An inkjet printer, a few characters smeared at the edges. There is a photograph of the person you were before. Another of the man on the bridge with his shield. "I saw him," you say, tapping your finger against the faded chlorobromide paper. "In DC."

At the back of the Russian folder, there's an envelope that clinks as you open it, the contents tumbling onto the table when the paper gives: a set of dog tags. _BARNES, JAMES B._

The man on the bridge called you _Bucky,_ which isn't your name.

—

"You used to call me Natalya," the Black Widow says the next morning. She is standing at the counter, pouring coffee from a French press into an unmarked mug. You have moved, once or twice, since you sat down at the table last night. "Before."

The only _before_ is in the documents in front of you. A straightforward assassination, Odessa. "I shot you."

"I've shot you, too," she says. "Before that. You trained me."

"You remember that?"

The Black Widow stirs a little sugar into her coffee, black and sweet. "I've seen videos."

You look again at the files she gave you, narratives that jigsaw against and into each other, refusing to form a clear picture. The Winter Soldier is a ghost. Yet you are built of pieces that meet and match, intelligible if imperfect components. "What did I teach you?"

"What you're good at."

You say, "What I'm good for."

The Black Widow shrugs. She is still standing at the counter. Her hair shines red in the dawn light streaming through the ruffled curtains over the kitchen window. This set is dressed for a purpose you cannot decipher. You do not belong here.

—

Your body wants rest, but you are unused to accommodating it. You pace the downstairs instead, inspecting the exits. The windows are single-pane, the sash locks worn brass. The doors have two locks each, no chain. The keys to the car are hanging on a hook by the front door. If there is an alarm system, it is too subtle for you to detect. You could leave at any time. You don't.

For thirty-four weeks, five days, ten hours, and sixteen minutes, your time and your body were your own. At first, you were curious. How much could you do, how far could you get, before they caught you? You can't say, now, what impulse propelled you beyond that, to go from warehouse to apartment to suburban home, emptying weapons caches and destroying HYDRA infrastructure.

"You can go if you want," the Black Widow says from the couch. Her book is tented over her sternum. "No one's stopping you."

You look out the window beyond her, at the blank white slate of the yard and the fields beyond, separated by a deep furrow that must be the road. "Do you have a mission for me?"

"I choose my own assignments now," she says. "So could you."

What you've already done is in a neat pile of folders stacked on the table in the next room. If you'd completed your mission and returned to base, you'd never have known. Everything goes at the end, but the end is getting farther and farther away, out of your field of vision. You can get clean; you can't get free.

—

In the morning, you burn the files that the Black Widow gave you in a metal can in the backyard. Then you dig out the car while she scrapes the ice from the windows. "Your arm, we'll take care of first," she says. "Then—we'll see."

Your breath comes out as white puffs in the cool air as you heft the loaded shovel. The picture of the man on the bridge is in your pocket, the one where tourists keep their wallets. The snow is densely packed around the wheels, slow to budge. You keep digging.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm [ladyofthelog](http://ladyofthelog.tumblr.com) on tumblr.


End file.
